Debbie Sonu
Biographic Data
| ID | 1604285 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Debbie Sonu |
| GIVEN NAMES | Debbie |
| FAMILY NAME | Sonu |
| SIGNATURE | SONU D |
| AFFILIATIONS | City University of New York |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1420-1885 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 61 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Remembering Ontological and Historical Potentials: A Response to Hannah Spector’s “In Search of Responsibility as Education”
Breaking Light on Economic Divide: How Elementary School Teachers Locate Class Inequality in Teaching and Schools
Background/Context: Macro-analyses have documented the raced and classed consequences of rampant economic inequality in schools and society. However, in educational research, there remain clear gaps in understanding how schoolteachers, especially those working with children, locate the appearances of economic inequality in their teaching and how they make sense of the social conditions that create such disparities. Purpose/Objective/Research Ques…
A Review of Noah De Lissovoy’s Capitalism, Pedagogy, and the Politics of Being: Bloomsbury, 2022
From criticality to shame: Childhood memories of social class and how they matter to elementary school teachers and teaching
In the United States, economic inequality in education is well-documented. However, less is known about the experiences of elementary school teachers who have broached issues of social class with their students. At the same time, the classed identity of teachers is still under-developed. This study takes a phenomenological approach to teacher subjectivity and examines how 57 New York City elementary school teachers narrated memories of class in t…
Sick at school: Teachers’ memories and the affective challenges that bodies present to constructions of childhood innocence, normalcy, and ignorance
Longstanding impressions of children as innocent to human frailty, alongside the emphasis on efficiency and management in schools, play undeniable roles in the way teachers engage with children experiencing death and illness. This paper draws from a larger study of 116 written childhood memories from prospective teachers and practitioners enrolled across four universities in Canada and the United States and focuses on the 12 memories that specifi…
Childhood innocence and experience: Memory, discourse and practice
This article examines how childhood innocence is taken up in (92) memories of undergraduate students across four sites in the US and Canada. Drawing from Foucault's theory of discourse, we examine how three themes—innocence as not knowing, innocence as being provided for, and loss of innocence as exposure to adversity—construct childhood as the absence of conflict, which perpetuates the myth of an innocence/experience binary and encourages a defi…
Possibilities for using visual drawing with student-teachers: Linking childhood memories to future teaching selves
Community-As-Difference: Non-Black Students in One Black University Space
In this article, we draw from a larger qualitative study to examine how racial encounters are experienced for three non-Black members in a university-based historically-Black student organization. Using the idea of community-as-difference, we present three findings that break open assumptions about racial coexistence: the importance of being singular yet historically-united, an ambivalence to belonging, and critiques of institutional multicultura…
The Dreamwork of Childhood Memory: The Futures Teachers Make from the Schooling Past
PEDAGOGICAL PRESENT traces of the past (Britzman, 2003) yet also telegraph dreams about how structures of schooling and society might be imagined otherwise.In teacher education, memories are often used in support of critical reflection.They provide the raw material for prospective teachers to contemplate both desirable and undesirable aspects of the teacher's role and to make observations about issues relating to classroom authority, values, and …
Making a racial difference: A Foucauldian analysis of school memories told by undergraduates of color in the United States
This paper draws from the writings of Michel Foucault and his recently reconsidered provocations on race and racialization. Using Foucault’s definition of ‘internal racism,’ race is understood as a complex set of correlations that are employed for the purpose of establishing (ab)normality and exercising various forms of expulsion. Racialization is then seen as the circulation of knowledge that makes racial categorization evident as scientific tru…
Childhood Memories of Playful Antics and Punishable Acts: Risking an Imperfect Future of Teaching and Learning
This paper takes up the question of risk by examining childhood memories of nuisance-making and punishment shared by 26 participants enrolled in teacher education and/or childhood studies programs. Our analysis surfaces a tension that, on the one hand, idealizes the child as innocent instigator of playful antics and, on the other, produces a child who is guilty of punishable acts. We read these memories as an invitation to theorize a middle groun…
Culturally Constructed Childhood(s): Expanding the Meaning of the Child in Teacher Education
Despite traditional understandings of child development in teacher education, the concept of the child is a remarkably imaginative figure. Tied to social, political, and historical discourses, the
Playing Slavery in First Grade: When “Developmental Appropriateness” Goes Awry in the Progressive Classroom
This article unfurls in the aftermath of an event where three first grade children at a reputable progressive elementary school were found playing slavery during school recess. As word caught on, parents ignited into a frenzy: some railed against the teacher, others demanded an answer, while still others believed this was precisely the meaning of progressive schooling. In swift response, school administrators sent a conciliatory email apologizing…
Stranger-making as difference: Childhood memories of belonging and exclusion by undergraduates of color
In this article, we draw from the notion of stranger-making to focus on how undergraduates of color at one large university in New York City recount their subjective experiences with inclusion and exclusion at the borderlands of educational spaces. We use narratives to evoke the unfolding of life events and to destabilize categories of difference that are all too often based on a politics of perception rather than an ethical gesture to know. This…
Education, Globalization and the Nation
Key Contexts and Challenges
A quarter century ago, Benedict Anderson (1991) published what came to be a seminal book on understanding nationalism and nation states, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism . Anderson argued that nations were not primarily bounded territories but ‘imagined communities’, created in the mind and heart through the mediation of a number of institutions and processes including schools, public monuments and histor…
Pedagogical Matters: New Materialisms and Curriculum Studies
The quasi-human child: How normative conceptions of childhood enabled neoliberal school reform in the United States
This paper argues that normative conceptions of the child, as a natural quasi-human being in need of guidance, enable current school reforms in the United States to directly link the child to neoliberal aims and objectives. In using Foucault's concept of governmentality and disciplinary power, we first present how the child is constructed as a subject of the adult world, then trace how such understandings invite school policies and practices that…
Forgotten memories of a social justice education: Difficult knowledge and the impossibilities of school and research
This paper is about memory, the elusive process of remembering and of an encounter between a researcher and a participant who after five years reunited to remember. The object under study is a high school social justice curriculum with a central focus on the development of social action projects. Grounded in Pitt and Britzman's work on difficult knowledge, this paper asks: What do 10th grade students who spent four years attending a school commit…
The Fragility of Ecological Pedagogy: Elementary Social Studies Standards and Possibilities of New Materialism
The greatest challenge facing the field of environmentalism includes ontological questions over the human subject and its desensitization from landscapes of experience. In this article the authors draw from field experiences in New York City elementary schools (such as observations of teachers, NYS Scope and Sequence Standards for Social Studies, and the Common Core State Standards) to demonstrate how curricular engagements with nature and the en…
Illusions of Compliance: Performing the Public and Hidden Transcripts of Social Justice Education in Neoliberal Times
From a yearlong qualitative study, I propose an explanation for the growing frustration amongst educators and students who find their imaginings for a social justice education largely unmet, if not deliberately crushed, in the public school classroom. I argue that competing conceptions of social justice manifest as public performances as well as innocuous behind-the-scene interactions inextricably entrenched within neoliberal demands. To illustra…
From Ideal to Practice and Back Again: Beginning Teachers Teaching for Social Justice
The five authors of this article designed a multicase study to follow recent graduates of an elementary preservice teacher education program into their beginning teaching placements and explore the ways in which they enacted social justice curricula. The authors highlight the stories of three beginning teachers, honoring the plurality of their conceptions of social justice teaching and the resiliency they exhibited in translating social justice i…
The Fragility of Ecological Pedagogy: Elementary Social Studies Standards and Possibilities of New Materialism
The greatest challenge facing the field of environmentalism includes ontological questions over the human subject and its desensitization from landscapes of experience. In this article the authors draw from field experiences in New York City elementary schools (such as observations of teachers, NYS Scope and Sequence Standards for Social Studies, and the Common Core State Standards) to demonstrate how curricular engagements with nature and the en…
From Ideal to Practice and Back Again: Beginning Teachers Teaching for Social Justice
The five authors of this article designed a multicase study to follow recent graduates of an elementary preservice teacher education program into their beginning teaching placements and explore the ways in which they enacted social justice curricula. The authors highlight the stories of three beginning teachers, honoring the plurality of their conceptions of social justice teaching and the resiliency they exhibited in translating social justice i…
The quasi-human child: How normative conceptions of childhood enabled neoliberal school reform in the United States
This paper argues that normative conceptions of the child, as a natural quasi-human being in need of guidance, enable current school reforms in the United States to directly link the child to neoliberal aims and objectives. In using Foucault's concept of governmentality and disciplinary power, we first present how the child is constructed as a subject of the adult world, then trace how such understandings invite school policies and practices that…
Illusions of Compliance: Performing the Public and Hidden Transcripts of Social Justice Education in Neoliberal Times
From a yearlong qualitative study, I propose an explanation for the growing frustration amongst educators and students who find their imaginings for a social justice education largely unmet, if not deliberately crushed, in the public school classroom. I argue that competing conceptions of social justice manifest as public performances as well as innocuous behind-the-scene interactions inextricably entrenched within neoliberal demands. To illustra…
Forgotten memories of a social justice education: Difficult knowledge and the impossibilities of school and research
This paper is about memory, the elusive process of remembering and of an encounter between a researcher and a participant who after five years reunited to remember. The object under study is a high school social justice curriculum with a central focus on the development of social action projects. Grounded in Pitt and Britzman's work on difficult knowledge, this paper asks: What do 10th grade students who spent four years attending a school commit…
Making a racial difference: A Foucauldian analysis of school memories told by undergraduates of color in the United States
This paper draws from the writings of Michel Foucault and his recently reconsidered provocations on race and racialization. Using Foucault’s definition of ‘internal racism,’ race is understood as a complex set of correlations that are employed for the purpose of establishing (ab)normality and exercising various forms of expulsion. Racialization is then seen as the circulation of knowledge that makes racial categorization evident as scientific tru…
Possibilities for using visual drawing with student-teachers: Linking childhood memories to future teaching selves
Community-As-Difference: Non-Black Students in One Black University Space
In this article, we draw from a larger qualitative study to examine how racial encounters are experienced for three non-Black members in a university-based historically-Black student organization. Using the idea of community-as-difference, we present three findings that break open assumptions about racial coexistence: the importance of being singular yet historically-united, an ambivalence to belonging, and critiques of institutional multicultura…
Childhood Memories of Playful Antics and Punishable Acts: Risking an Imperfect Future of Teaching and Learning
This paper takes up the question of risk by examining childhood memories of nuisance-making and punishment shared by 26 participants enrolled in teacher education and/or childhood studies programs. Our analysis surfaces a tension that, on the one hand, idealizes the child as innocent instigator of playful antics and, on the other, produces a child who is guilty of punishable acts. We read these memories as an invitation to theorize a middle groun…
From Ideal to Practice and Back Again: Beginning Teachers Teaching for Social Justice
The five authors of this article designed a multicase study to follow recent graduates of an elementary preservice teacher education program into their beginning teaching placements and explore the ways in which they enacted social justice curricula. The authors highlight the stories of three beginning teachers, honoring the plurality of their conceptions of social justice teaching and the resiliency they exhibited in translating social justice i…
Illusions of Compliance: Performing the Public and Hidden Transcripts of Social Justice Education in Neoliberal Times
From a yearlong qualitative study, I propose an explanation for the growing frustration amongst educators and students who find their imaginings for a social justice education largely unmet, if not deliberately crushed, in the public school classroom. I argue that competing conceptions of social justice manifest as public performances as well as innocuous behind-the-scene interactions inextricably entrenched within neoliberal demands. To illustra…
The Fragility of Ecological Pedagogy: Elementary Social Studies Standards and Possibilities of New Materialism
The greatest challenge facing the field of environmentalism includes ontological questions over the human subject and its desensitization from landscapes of experience. In this article the authors draw from field experiences in New York City elementary schools (such as observations of teachers, NYS Scope and Sequence Standards for Social Studies, and the Common Core State Standards) to demonstrate how curricular engagements with nature and the en…
Education, Globalization and the Nation
Key Contexts and Challenges
A quarter century ago, Benedict Anderson (1991) published what came to be a seminal book on understanding nationalism and nation states, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism . Anderson argued that nations were not primarily bounded territories but ‘imagined communities’, created in the mind and heart through the mediation of a number of institutions and processes including schools, public monuments and histor…
Pedagogical Matters: New Materialisms and Curriculum Studies
The quasi-human child: How normative conceptions of childhood enabled neoliberal school reform in the United States
This paper argues that normative conceptions of the child, as a natural quasi-human being in need of guidance, enable current school reforms in the United States to directly link the child to neoliberal aims and objectives. In using Foucault's concept of governmentality and disciplinary power, we first present how the child is constructed as a subject of the adult world, then trace how such understandings invite school policies and practices that…
Forgotten memories of a social justice education: Difficult knowledge and the impossibilities of school and research
This paper is about memory, the elusive process of remembering and of an encounter between a researcher and a participant who after five years reunited to remember. The object under study is a high school social justice curriculum with a central focus on the development of social action projects. Grounded in Pitt and Britzman's work on difficult knowledge, this paper asks: What do 10th grade students who spent four years attending a school commit…
Stranger-making as difference: Childhood memories of belonging and exclusion by undergraduates of color
In this article, we draw from the notion of stranger-making to focus on how undergraduates of color at one large university in New York City recount their subjective experiences with inclusion and exclusion at the borderlands of educational spaces. We use narratives to evoke the unfolding of life events and to destabilize categories of difference that are all too often based on a politics of perception rather than an ethical gesture to know. This…
The Dreamwork of Childhood Memory: The Futures Teachers Make from the Schooling Past
PEDAGOGICAL PRESENT traces of the past (Britzman, 2003) yet also telegraph dreams about how structures of schooling and society might be imagined otherwise.In teacher education, memories are often used in support of critical reflection.They provide the raw material for prospective teachers to contemplate both desirable and undesirable aspects of the teacher's role and to make observations about issues relating to classroom authority, values, and …
Making a racial difference: A Foucauldian analysis of school memories told by undergraduates of color in the United States
This paper draws from the writings of Michel Foucault and his recently reconsidered provocations on race and racialization. Using Foucault’s definition of ‘internal racism,’ race is understood as a complex set of correlations that are employed for the purpose of establishing (ab)normality and exercising various forms of expulsion. Racialization is then seen as the circulation of knowledge that makes racial categorization evident as scientific tru…
Childhood Memories of Playful Antics and Punishable Acts: Risking an Imperfect Future of Teaching and Learning
This paper takes up the question of risk by examining childhood memories of nuisance-making and punishment shared by 26 participants enrolled in teacher education and/or childhood studies programs. Our analysis surfaces a tension that, on the one hand, idealizes the child as innocent instigator of playful antics and, on the other, produces a child who is guilty of punishable acts. We read these memories as an invitation to theorize a middle groun…
Culturally Constructed Childhood(s): Expanding the Meaning of the Child in Teacher Education
Despite traditional understandings of child development in teacher education, the concept of the child is a remarkably imaginative figure. Tied to social, political, and historical discourses, the
Playing Slavery in First Grade: When “Developmental Appropriateness” Goes Awry in the Progressive Classroom
This article unfurls in the aftermath of an event where three first grade children at a reputable progressive elementary school were found playing slavery during school recess. As word caught on, parents ignited into a frenzy: some railed against the teacher, others demanded an answer, while still others believed this was precisely the meaning of progressive schooling. In swift response, school administrators sent a conciliatory email apologizing…
Childhood innocence and experience: Memory, discourse and practice
This article examines how childhood innocence is taken up in (92) memories of undergraduate students across four sites in the US and Canada. Drawing from Foucault's theory of discourse, we examine how three themes—innocence as not knowing, innocence as being provided for, and loss of innocence as exposure to adversity—construct childhood as the absence of conflict, which perpetuates the myth of an innocence/experience binary and encourages a defi…
Possibilities for using visual drawing with student-teachers: Linking childhood memories to future teaching selves
Community-As-Difference: Non-Black Students in One Black University Space
In this article, we draw from a larger qualitative study to examine how racial encounters are experienced for three non-Black members in a university-based historically-Black student organization. Using the idea of community-as-difference, we present three findings that break open assumptions about racial coexistence: the importance of being singular yet historically-united, an ambivalence to belonging, and critiques of institutional multicultura…
Sick at school: Teachers’ memories and the affective challenges that bodies present to constructions of childhood innocence, normalcy, and ignorance
Longstanding impressions of children as innocent to human frailty, alongside the emphasis on efficiency and management in schools, play undeniable roles in the way teachers engage with children experiencing death and illness. This paper draws from a larger study of 116 written childhood memories from prospective teachers and practitioners enrolled across four universities in Canada and the United States and focuses on the 12 memories that specifi…
Breaking Light on Economic Divide: How Elementary School Teachers Locate Class Inequality in Teaching and Schools
Background/Context: Macro-analyses have documented the raced and classed consequences of rampant economic inequality in schools and society. However, in educational research, there remain clear gaps in understanding how schoolteachers, especially those working with children, locate the appearances of economic inequality in their teaching and how they make sense of the social conditions that create such disparities. Purpose/Objective/Research Ques…
A Review of Noah De Lissovoy’s Capitalism, Pedagogy, and the Politics of Being: Bloomsbury, 2022
From criticality to shame: Childhood memories of social class and how they matter to elementary school teachers and teaching
In the United States, economic inequality in education is well-documented. However, less is known about the experiences of elementary school teachers who have broached issues of social class with their students. At the same time, the classed identity of teachers is still under-developed. This study takes a phenomenological approach to teacher subjectivity and examines how 57 New York City elementary school teachers narrated memories of class in t…
Remembering Ontological and Historical Potentials: A Response to Hannah Spector’s “In Search of Responsibility as Education”
Sociology (18 works) · Psychology (15 works) · Law (13 works) · Pedagogy (12 works) · Political science (12 works) · Law (10 works) · Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy (9 works) · Critical Race Theory in Education (8 works) · Social science (8 works) · Developmental psychology (7 works)